The changing market represents a vast opportunity for businesses to improve their relevance and expand their market in the online world. Researchers predict e-commerce will be 17 percent of U.S. retail sales by 2022, according to Digital Commerce 360. The U.S. will spend about $460 billion online in 2017. These figures will continue to climb as mobile and internet use expand both in the U.S. and in developing markets around the world.
One of the biggest advantages of listing your products on Amazon is that you can use its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program, which handles shipping for you. WP-Lister Lite for Amazon supports that feature, but keep in mind that if you use it, you’ll need to direct any purchases made on your WooCommerce store to your Amazon listings. To get started, you’ll want to check out an online guide to configuring both platforms to work together.
The rise of e-commerce has forced IT personnel to move beyond infrastructure design and maintenance to consider numerous customer-facing aspects, such as consumer data privacy and security. When developing IT systems and applications to accommodate e-commerce activities, data governance-related regulatory compliance mandates, personally identifiable information privacy rules and information protection protocols must be considered.
"As a wedding filmmaker and YouTuber, I am constantly searching for new music. Soundstripe helps fill this need by giving filmmakers like myself an incredible gift: high-quality music from talented artists that is legal to use in our films. With constantly updated playlists for wedding films, I can find musical inspiration that matches my couple’s vibes quickly and easily. Likewise, if I need a song for a YouTube vlog, Soundstripe is there with a plethora of options to choose from."
You can see why Shopify scored top marks in this area. Features like these don’t just make running your online store possible – they make it easy and enjoyable too. Put simply, Shopify was designed to help people build an online store. That’s why it’s packed with these high quality sales features, which were specially created to support your ecommerce business.

Installing WooCommerce is free, but integrating the shopping cart completely with the system requires additional investment. Moreover, if you don't know WordPress, you won't know how to use WooCommerce. But the biggest problem with WooCommerce is its lack of scalability; as your business grows and you get more sellers, products and customers on your database, WooCommerce starts slowing down.

Shopify – A popular choice among many SMBs, Shopify has features that let you sell online, on social media, and in-person. It lets merchants build and customize their ecommerce site through easy-to-use interfaces and templates. And it has features such as inventory management, reporting, buy buttons and more. It also has social selling functionalities for those who are active on sites like Facebook and Pinterest.
Unilog is a global technology company that delivers powerful, affordable eCommerce solutions for the B2B marketplace. Our cloud-based eCommerce platform and product data enrichment services help distributors, manufacturers, and wholesalers increase online sales, reduce cost to serve, and enhance their digital channel. Unilog is an ISO 9001:2008- and ISO 8000-certified company with North American headquarters outside of Philadelphia, PA and international headquarters in Bangalore, India. For more information, visit www.unilogcorp.com.
Not every song posted on SoundCloud is free, but both big-name and lesser-known artists often offer free downloads if you can manage to find their verified profile. You can browse SoundCloud by artist, genre, popularity, or latest postings; you will be surprised at how many free tracks are out there. There is also a section of the site dedicated to tracks released under Creative Commons licenses, which means you’re free to download, remix, or tweak them as much as you like.
Ecommerce has emerged as the single biggest growth driver in the worldwide marketplace. eMarketer, a leading independent market researcher, predicts global B2C ecommerce sales will reach $1.5 trillion this year, a 20 percent increase from 20131. And according to Forrester Research, B2B ecommerce spending in the U.S. alone reached $559 billion in 20132. If ecommerce is important to your business then the solution you choose is arguably one of the most important business decisions you will make.
E-commerce is conducted using a variety of applications, such as email, online catalogs and shopping carts, EDI, the File Transfer Protocol, web services, and mobile devices. This includes business-to-business activities and outreach, such as using email for unsolicited ads -- usually viewed as spam -- to consumers and other business prospects, as well as sending out e-newsletters to subscribers and SMS -- short message service -- texts to mobile devices. More companies now try to entice consumers directly online, using tools such as digital coupons, social media marketing and targeted advertisements.
The Free Music Philosophy was reported on by diverse media outlets including Billboard,[5] Forbes,[6] Levi's Original Music Magazine,[7] The Free Radical,[8] Wired[9][10] and The New York Times.[11] Along with free software and Linux (a free operating system), copyleft licenses, the explosion of the Web and rise of P2P, the cementing of mp3 as a compression standard for recordings, and despite the efforts of the music industry, free music became largely the reality in the early 21st century.[12] Organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons with free information champions like Lawrence Lessig were devising numerous licenses that offered different flavours of copyright and copyleft. The question was no longer why and how music should be free, but rather how creativity would flourish while musicians developed models to generate revenue in the Internet era.[4][13][14]
SuiteCommerce enables B2B and B2C merchants to rapidly create unique, personalized, and compelling branded shopping experiences across multiple channels. Differentiate your brand and exceed customer expectations, whether it is through mobile, online, or in-person, and empower your sales associates to provide engaging customer acquisition and retention experiences by utilizing a single source of item, inventory, customer and order data to feed your customer-facing systems. SuiteCommerce's integrated cloud-based nature unifies business applications and provides a central repository for order management and customer details, item and inventory data, creates seamless, omni-channel, brand experiences, and streamlines your business for continuous growth.
The shift of live content from traditional broadcast television to online sources has significantly changed the video industry -- and especially, the news media industry. News typically derives its value and attracts viewers with live updates and real-time engagement. The rise of live online alternatives extends those capabilities to nontraditional voices in the digital realm. [More...]
If budget is not an issue and you are solely looking for a place to sell products with little to no technical involvement, the fully hosted SaaS Shopify Plus is worth checking out. For enterprise businesses, this means a lot of removal of opportunity costs; if you’d rather spend money on marketing and product development and not on testing servers.
For businesses that prefer a simple online store, Magento Go is Magento’s most basic plan. Features ideal for small retail shops include the very simple user interface, a highly developed knowledge base that answers almost every question you might have, very developed product management, and no transaction fees (just one service fee per month). Ultimately, Magento Go offers a very basic experience; there is limited bandwidth, limited themes, few add-ons, and infantile development features.
hybris has a robust product content management capabilities that allow companies to collaboratively build and manage product data across multiple touchpoints. It also provides centralised order management so merchants have a single view of order information across all channels. This makes back office management easier and merchants are able to offer a better shopping experience by implementing flexible pickup and fulfilment options to customers.
E-commerce allows customers to overcome geographical barriers and allows them to purchase products anytime and from anywhere. Online and traditional markets have different strategies for conducting business. Traditional retailers offer fewer assortment of products because of shelf space where, online retailers often hold no inventory but send customer orders directly to the manufacture. The pricing strategies are also different for traditional and online retailers. Traditional retailers base their prices on store traffic and the cost to keep inventory. Online retailers base prices on the speed of delivery.
Now that you have a promising product idea and a clear overview of the market, it’s time to start thinking about the key elements of your store, such as your brand name, domain name, brand guidelines, and your logo. Getting your brand right from the start can help accelerate the growth and conquer the hearts of potential customers. Before turning your attention to building the store, you should spend some time studying the basics of SEO, so that your business gets off to a good start.
Hey Darren; that’s really a fantastic article! I assume you’ve put a lot of effort into that but believe me that’s the best comparison of eCommerce platforms I’ve seen so far 🙂 One question popped up on my mind. Do you believe that an eCommerce platform lacks certain competencies if a merchant using that platform needs external apps to support his/her store? I work for an app developer company – so I may be subjective in that sense – but for me eCommerce apps add a lot of value on top of the standard offering of the platforms. For instance, we provide AI powered personalization for the eCommerce websites. An eCommerce platform’s development team do not need to bother creating these competencies in house – and they may not succeed – as this is not their expertise. I’d love to hear about your thoughts 🙂
Black Friday made its debut sometime in the 1960s as the day to help retailers move from the red to the black in profits. The day-after-Thanksgiving shopping extravaganza has grown well beyond its roots since then. Last year, at the peak of Black Friday, shoppers were spending nearly $1 million per minute. However, the origins of Black Friday were pre-Internet. [More...]
Two of the most important factors behind poor performance are server distance and load. If your servers are overloaded or too far away from your visitors’ locations, your site can load slowly. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) tackles this issue by distributing cached copies of your site to nearby locations from data centers around the world, thereby lightening the load on your main servers.
The Free Music Philosophy was reported on by diverse media outlets including Billboard,[5] Forbes,[6] Levi's Original Music Magazine,[7] The Free Radical,[8] Wired[9][10] and The New York Times.[11] Along with free software and Linux (a free operating system), copyleft licenses, the explosion of the Web and rise of P2P, the cementing of mp3 as a compression standard for recordings, and despite the efforts of the music industry, free music became largely the reality in the early 21st century.[12] Organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons with free information champions like Lawrence Lessig were devising numerous licenses that offered different flavours of copyright and copyleft. The question was no longer why and how music should be free, but rather how creativity would flourish while musicians developed models to generate revenue in the Internet era.[4][13][14]
Another way to analyze popularity is to tie it in with where customers are going when they leave a certain ecommerce platform. The reason this is interesting is that it gives you an indicator of which of the companies have kept up with technologies and made improvements to bring in additional customers. A quick market share search on Shopify shows that the Shopify company is gaining most of its customers from Bigcommerce, Big Cartel, and Volusion. Bigcommerce is still stealing some customers from Shopify, but it used to be the number one place that people would go after Shopify. We assume it's because of the Bigcommerce pricing.
Business to Business or B2B refers to electronic commerce between businesses rather than between a business and a consumer. B2B businesses often deal with hundreds or even thousands of other businesses, either as customers or suppliers. Carrying out these transactions electronically provides vast competitive advantages over traditional methods. When implemented properly, ecommerce is often faster, cheaper and more convenient than the traditional methods of bartering goods and services.
The only downside in all this is that you somehow need to get your hands on a WordPress site in the first place. And okay, I know this is not particularly a problem for you maybe, but we have to remember that WordPress can be quite confusing to a beginner, and the need to first set up a WordPress site and only then a WooCommerce store is far from intuitive.
The benefits of e-commerce include its around-the-clock availability, the speed of access, the wide availability of goods and services for the consumer, easy accessibility, and international reach. Its perceived downsides include sometimes limited customer service, consumers not being able to see or touch a product prior to purchase, and the wait time for product shipping.
SoundCloud essentially serves as the YouTube of music uploading, meaning anyone can upload their tracks to the site before specifying whether they’re available for download or strictly for streaming purposes. Moreover, the site touts an extremely active user community and one of the sleekest user interfaces of any site on our list, one conveniently lined with a navigational bar at the top and direct access to the service’s accompanying mobile apps. Artists might not always offer free downloads of their music, but the labels nearly always do. Fair warning: SoundCloud’s had a bit of financial trouble recently, so you might want to visit the site soon and go on a downloading spree just in case the site goes kaput.
Choosing the best ecommerce site builder is really based on your needs. We do want to recommend that you consider a few as front runners – BigCommerce was by far the strongest option for start-ups looking for a platform to grow your business with. Prestashop gives entrepreneurs the best bang for your buck. X-Cart is one of the best free ecommerce platforms if you have dev resources.

CoreCommerce has a huge range of plans available, more than most other platforms. This makes it suitable for just about any business looking to break into ecommerce and start up a store. The amount of choices can be a bit dizzying, though, and CoreCommerce’s own website is not the most appealing. This reflects poorly on the options it can give to its customers.

Business-to-administration (B2A) refers to transactions conducted online between companies and public administration or government bodies. Many branches of government are dependent on e-services or products in one way or another, especially when it comes to legal documents, registers, social security, fiscals and employment. Businesses can supply these electronically. B2A services have grown considerably in recent years as investments have been made in e-government capabilities.
User-friendly e-commerce software platform with mobile app. Merchants can create their website and sell products to B2C and B2B (both) customers. API integrated with all major payment gateways and shipping companies. Having marketing tools like: automated mailer to abandoned order, reward point system to engage customers, persistent cart, automatic currency based on customer location, etc.
Having an online storefront is one of the most straightforward ways to conduct ecommerce. The merchant creates a website and uses it to sell products and services using shopping carts and ecommerce solutions. The “right” solution will depend on the merchant and their products. Below is a list of some of the top ecommerce platforms. Check them out and see which one is right for you.
Last but not least, there are the transaction fees. In essence, whenever you sell something with either of the platforms, they will charge you a small fee (for processing the payment, delivering the money to your account, etc.). Those fees change quite often, so I won't get into that here, but just be aware that they exist. Usually, they sit around 2%-3% per transaction but make sure to check the exact numbers before signing up with either of the platforms.
The platform is truly everything you want out of an ecommerce solution, equipped with PCI compliance, tax calculation features, return management modules, loyalty programs, email marketing, and more. While the interface’s dashboard can be a little tricky, there are some beneficial features, such as the ability to list and add product attributes, site management functions, and SEO optimization features. Magento Enterprise is primarily geared toward retailers who want the all-in, hands off package.
Features, including: SEO tools (sitemaps, customizable metadata and URLS, bulk editing), fuzzy and exact product search, ability to send abandoned cart emails, blog, mobile store, coupon and discount capabilities, integrated ratings and reviews, multiple product photos with zooming capability, ability to handle subscriptions/recurring product orders, drop shipping integration, ability to sell customizable products, fulfillment by Amazon integration, real-time shipping and tracking, reward points program compatibility, Google trusted stores
Hi. Every marketplace site should offer their vendors the option to feature their listing. This means that for a small fee, their listing can appear ahead of other listings in that category. The plugin should make this listing last a limited time; this option should appear at the end of the 'create a product listing' page. It should offer a (PayPal) payment option so that the vendor can pay for the featured listing. Once this is done, the listing should go live automatically. These listings should also ideally be automatically deleted from the system after the expiry date. Thanks.
CUSTOMER SERVICE – Additionally, with a commercial solution you benefit from the support structure. Open source solutions such as WordPress are often community driven and you are therefore dependent on that community to provide support. While that can also work very well – if you are in desperate need of help at 3 am on a Sunday, it’s nice to have a guarantee it will be there.